


Constantinople and Timbuktu

by orphan_account



Category: Motorcity
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M, meanwhile in russia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:50:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mike is the most polite barbarian Chuck has ever met. [the Russian nomad!au]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Constantinople and Timbuktu

Chuck always suspected his good looks would be the end of him.  
  
Well, no.  
  
He never suspected any such thing. This is not to say he ever took issue with what he saw in reflective surfaces, but he knew he was hopelessly scraggly--even when he should have been plump with baby fat. Though his facial features were well-proportioned enough, his hair and limbs were far too long. Until the day came that unkempt and faintly anemic became the beauty ideal, Chuck would have no reason to suspect his appearance of getting him into any sort of trouble.  
  
Of course, Jacob just had to leave him unattended in the square of a Russian town governed by an unkempt and faintly anemic tsarevich with a recently assassinated body double. The ensuing flurry of miscommunication resulted in Chuck being ushered into the palace, groomed thoroughly, and ordered into a series of rigorous Russian language lessons. Only nine and captivated by his sudden immersion in rural royalty, Chuck hadn’t thought to pay attention to the court gossip over the strange old Greek merchant searching the town for his missing apprentice. By the time the novelty of the palace wore off and Chuck remembered to ask after his guardian, Jacob had moved on with his trade caravan.  
  
Seven years and five assassination attempts later (six if Chuck were to include an ambiguously bad case of indigestion in 1497), Chuck had developed nerves of steel.  
  
Alright, no.  
  
He had developed a comprehensive--though heavily accented--grasp of the Russian language, the ability to braid a boyarina’s hair better and faster than any of her boyarina friends, and a knack for seeing shadows where there were none. He had, most importantly of all, developed a sense of contentedness within the palace terem.  
  
Playing prince became enjoyable once Chuck grew used to the unimportant (a term which defined nearly all princely responsibilities associated with this tsarevich since this tsarevich was the twelfth son of the twelfth son of someone faintly important) political meetings he was made to attend and the near-constant fear of assassination. He came to love his bed and the court food, which--although mediocre in comparison to Jacob’s foreign imports--only gave him stomach troubles when ineptly poisoned.  
  
He even found friends in all the boyarinas who listened to every word he spoke when he haltingly translated stories of princes and sorcerers that old Slavonic entertainers brought to the palace. (The tsarina Klara never did warm up to him, but Chuck was told her nature came with her khudaya stature and tried not to let her standoffishness affect his politeness.)  
  
And though he sometimes dreamt of sun-warmed naps in the back of Jacob’s wagon as their old horse plowed along, or the dust he kicked up from the streets he remembers as home before that, Chuck was happy.  
  
This, of course, is when the tsarevich dies of the Polish disease.  
  
The tsarevich sent to replace the old is dark-haired, robust, and thirty years old. Despite all the cosmetic tricks Chuck had learned from the boyarinas over the years, his services were no longer required. Feeling some loyalty to the country he had come to think of as home, Chuck swallowed fear and didn’t protest when he was told his next years would be spent in the makeshift military reserves in Moscow.  
  
But when the boyarinas take pity on him and plot him an escape route (involving the shaving of his rather modest beard and all of their bed linens), Chuck doesn’t exactly protest that either.  
  
A merchant caravan en route to Novgorod picks Chuck up on his way out of town, glad for an extra pair of hands attached to a low-maintenance body. Having been sent packing with a day’s rations and a single change of clothes, Chuck was ecstatic for the work. His time with Jacob was not yet so far removed from his memory that adapting to the road was hard, and though he did now dream of Klara and his friends in the palace terem, he had no trouble keeping up with the demands of the road.  
  
The first weeks were rough and a few close calls with passing Mongol riding parties nearly sent Chuck into cardiac arrest, but he works hard and earns a few spending trinkets from the most successful merchants impressed with his attitude (occasional bouts of screaming aside). He hears stories from European travellers and even catches word of a bumbling old fruits merchant summoned by royalty in Denmark for intrigue of his recipes. In high spirits, a borderline wealthy silk merchant agrees to take Chuck onwards to Europe in search of this Jacob-esque character after the end of this expedition.  
  
And this, of course, is when a stampede of raging stallions and dark-eyed barbarians fall upon their caravan in the dead of the night.  
  
Chuck is sure he would have run, or at least tried to hide, but instead--stooped down by the watering hole at the time--trips over his own panic at the first screams and begins to drown.  
  


* * *

_Constantinople and Timbuktu_  
the Russian nomads!au  
mike/chuck, et al.

* * *

  
Chuck doesn’t expect to wake up, but he does. He wakes up gasping, then choking when his throat cracks dry and raw. Water is splashed over his already damp face, burning cold in his eyes and stinging against the scrapes on his skin. His hair is pulled and his vision clears not long after, making a smiling Tatar horseman come into view.  
  
He thinks he blacks out for quite a while longer.  
  
The Tatar is still there when he comes to a second time, tending to his horse and looking the other way. Chuck scrambles up and turns to run without a second though. He is, however, forced to think twice when he turns right into a larger, much more disgruntled horse.  
  
It snorts derisively into his face. Chuck screams and falls right back down. The Tatar is looming over him again in a second, and Chuck braces himself for--some form of pain, or death, that doesn’t come.  
  
All that does come is a string of foreign words that Chuck can’t understand as the Tatar starts to speak, animated and uncharacteristically cheerful when Chuck dares sneak a peek at him. When it becomes obvious Chuck is intent on, or at least only capable of, staring dumbly, the man stops and seems to reconsider his approach.  
  
He eventually holds a hand down to Chuck and says, “Mike.”  
  
Chuck stares longer and harder until that hand stretches down further and hauls him up forcibly. He yelps and stumbles along until they stop, right in front of the entirely too unimpressed horse that had put an abrupt end to his escape plan. The Tatar--Mike, maybe, though that could be short for anything from Mikhail to murderer in his language for all Chuck knows--gestures at the space between them and leaves them alone.  
  
Feeling strangely compelled by his four-legged guard, Chuck does not move.  
  
A chunk of bread appears in front of him. Maybe-Mike says something sharp to his horse when it tries to snap at the bread and Chuck takes a tentative step backwards when the loaf is held up to him. Though he reasons there must be easier ways to beat him to death than with a loaf of bread, Chuck can’t conceive any less-murderous intentions the Tatar might have.  
  
The horse snorts again and Chuck could swear he sees it roll its eyes at him. Mike frowns when Chuck shuffles back even further and speaks to his horse again, whatever he says sending it stalking away with a toss of its head. Chuck freezes when the bread is shaken under his nose again.  
  
He’s pretty sure at this point that Mike is trying to feed him, but the why remains a big blank. Tatars aren’t known for their dalliances with poison.  
  
After another beat of inaction, Mike starts to frown again. He leans in and squints at Chuck, but steps back when Chuck shrinks down. He says something and frowns deeper. Coming to some conclusion a moment later, he bites a chunk out of the bread before offering the rest to Chuck again.  
  
And Chuck realizes he’s standing face to face with either the single pacifistic Tatar horseman in the entirety of Russia, or a cannibal who has deemed him too scrawny to eat just yet.  
  
His pessimism settles him on the latter and he says, “Oh, uh, no thank you.”  
  
Mike smiles, not understanding. Chuck repeats himself in Slavonic and receives the same, unwavering response. With less stamina than he’d need to outrun a horse and no other options apparent to him, Chuck takes the bread.  
  
  
  
When they start losing their light, Mike lays out two blankets and pulls Chuck up from the spot on the ground he had confined himself to in order to appear as small and unappetizing as possible. He leads Chuck to each blanket in turn, then backs away and just--waits. Chuck, still reeling from being inexplicably alive, stays where he’s left and tries not to even breathe.  
  
He’s already ruled out murder. Aside from a dead swan Mike produced from seemingly nowhere, he didn’t seem particularly keen on violence. Or cannibalism, for that matter. Chuck didn’t linger long on the idea that he might be a political hostage of some sort, either, because Mike hasn’t made any demands.  
  
Based on the way he kept trying to speak to Chuck in his own language, Chuck isn’t even sure he could make any demands.  
  
Although he was not quite yet at the end of his exhaustive mental list of cruel intentions, Chuck had to begin considering the possibility that Mike didn’t mean him any harm.  
  
Experimentally, Chuck starts towards the rattier of the two blankets--a gray quilt with a jagged orange stripe fraying down the middle. He stops at the edge of it and looks back at Mike, who--smiling again--walks the other way to claim the second blanket.  
  
Then, without any pomp whatsoever, Mike lies down and goes right to sleep with his back to Chuck.  
  
Chuck gapes.  
  
The horses are almost out of sight, and Chuck suspects them all of far too much apathy to worry about one chasing him down, anyway. Mike’s bow is lying unstrung by his packs, closer to Chuck than to himself. With the weight of the realization that he isn’t even a prisoner here, Chuck sits himself down and curls his fingers into fists against the makeshift bed prepared for him.  
  
And of course he’s not a prisoner, logic rails. Prisoners aren’t fed so well, and don’t have their (admittedly crude) beds made for them. Prisoners don’t get smiles and names. Chuck wills himself to relax.  
  
Mike the Tatar horseman hums in his sleep.  
  
Chuck gets up and runs.  
  
  
  
He gets as far as the outskirts of a sleeping town before his hyper-developed protective instincts wear off and he realizes he’s still clutching the blanket he’d chosen. The light of the sun is starting to stain the sky again and an aggressive baker shoos him off her property when she catches him loitering about, dithering with the voices in his head.  
  
No part of Chuck was advocating Mike as a potential travel partner, really, but pillaging barbarian or no, he didn’t think the guy deserved to have his blanket stolen. Even if he probably was in cahoots with the Mongol raid that scattered Chuck’s caravan, Mike was showing all signs of being a nice guy.  
  
A nice guy who really deserved two blankets.  
  
Chuck buys a loaf of bread to calm the baker and turns back around. His aforementioned protective instincts call him incredibly inappropriate names in protest, but he keeps moving. Mike probably won’t even be waiting around by the time he finds their campsite again, anyway.  
  
The prospect of that is unexpectedly upsetting.  
  
Mike is there, though, waiting with the patience of a monk when Chuck trots back into sight at about midday. He uncoils his legs from beneath himself and gets up to take the bread and blanket as soon as Chuck’s within arms reach.  
  
Chuck, for lack of any better ideas, laughs nervously and rubs a hand against the back of his neck. “Oh, uh, hi. Sorry, I got--lost. I wasn’t--.”  
  
Mike folds the blanket into a neat square and tucks it away with the bread in his packs before leading the horses towards Chuck. He’s still smiling, the expression completely bizarre on a Tatar’s face, and Chuck feels his shoulders slump a little.  
  
“Okay, maybe I was going to run away, but I didn’t mean to take your things. It’s just that I thought you were going to kill me, you know? And--and--what?”  
  
Chuck stops when his breath runs a bit thin and Mike parks a horse (the one that radiates hate and disappointment) in front of him.  
  
Then Mike says, so heavily accented Chuck barely understands, “Go.”  
  
The apparent dismissal is so sudden that Chuck feels a second’s disappointment before recognizes the permission to leave, very quickly, for what it is. He titters.  
  
“Oh, go? Like, that way?” He waves a hand behind himself. “Yes. Going. Thank--uh, thank you. Bye!”  
  
He manages two steps before he’s pulled back by the elbow and turned around to face Mike’s hand, pointing straight to the horse.  
  
“Go.”  
  
Chuck cringes. Even though he’s begrudgingly come to conclude that Mike is not going to kill him, option number two for the meaning of go in Mike-speak is still incredibly unappealing.  
  
“I am not getting up on that thing,” he says with a strange determination fueled solely by panic.  
  
The horse spits very close to his face. Chuck shrieks a little. Mike looks between them and appears to consider the impasse they seem to be at. He taps his foot, frowns at his horse, and smiles at Chuck.  
  
Then he’s moving, and Chuck should really see it coming, but he still screams, longer and louder, when he’s hauled up and thrown right over the back of the great death-trap of a beast.  
  
  
  
Despite the thought he puts into the matter, and it’s essentially the only thing he does think about these days, Chuck cannot figure out how he came from being a tsarevich’s body double to a Tatar’s travelling partner in the span of a few weeks. He still wondered some days if he wasn’t going to become a Tatar’s dinner one of these days, but for the most part, he’s given no reason to believe Mike’s intentions extend beyond escorting him somewhere. (The horse Chuck is made to ride is a different matter. Chuck knows that thing wants him dead.)  
  
Where this somewhere might be remains as much of a mystery as Mike’s motives.  
  
By the fifth day of their seemingly random off-road travels, Chuck has stopped wondering. Every hour of tundra starts looking the same as the one before it. They skirt around towns and avoid caravans, the horses apparently conditioned to avoid humans in general.  
  
Mike disappears for an hour or two each day when they stop for the day, leaving Chuck with both the horses and all his things, and returns with simple, but ample, rations for the next day. Twice he brought back honeyed apples and once he produced a new shirt that he holds out patiently until Chuck realizes it’s for him.  
  
Chuck tries not to think about how Mike might be coming into possession of such things. He reasons that a single man couldn’t do too much damage to an entire village, and when that single man is Mike, no harm could possibly come to anyone. Chuck likes to think he knows Mike well enough by now to not suspect him of small bouts of domestic terrorism for the sake of some fancy breads.  
  
Of course, he gets that he doesn’t know Mike very well at all. He defies all logic when it comes to Chuck (getting more careful about helping him up onto the devil horse’s back each time, serving him the best half of the birds he shoots, and generally being a perfect gentleman), but could easily drop the act every time Chuck’s not looking.  
  
“I could be reaping the benefits of murder, you know,” he says to the kinder of the two horses as he braids its mane the way Mike showed him days ago. “Or at least petty theft. I don’t want to be living off of petty theft. I should just go. He wouldn’t stop me. Right?”  
  
The horse casually steps on his foot. Chuck promptly forgets his question.  
  
  
  
The thing about going is that Chuck doesn’t want to do that, either. He hasn’t seen a road in two days and might never find his way back to civilization, especially with a probably fractured bone in his toe. He could come across a proper Tatar fraction of the Great Horde before he finds a town that would take him in. Any number of things could go wrong.  
  
He could end up right back where he started, drafted into the army reserves in Moscow.  
  
And he’d definitely lose Mike. Sometime between splitting a jug of kvass and an impromptu event Chuck might privately call a snowball fight, that prospect had started to bother Chuck. He doesn’t consider Mike a friend, because at the end of the day Tatar horsemen don’t become friends, but--.  
  
But in two weeks, Mike had become just that.  
  
Chuck is laughing more, screaming less. He gets used to the hours of travel each day and stops questioning the origin of the things Mike is able to procure. He learns to care for the horses without being kicked in the ribs, and the one he’s made to ride stops spitting at him quite so much.  
  
He dreams, once every few days, that Mike’s eyes will go dark and a raiding party will flank him as he rides into a burning village to eliminate any survivors and take possession of anything worth his attention. When he wakes up, he won’t think about it, but he rides a step farther away from Mike than he normally would.  
  
On those days, when they stop, he notices Mike carefully keeping his distance, respecting Chuck’s spontaneous need for increased personal space despite not knowing the why. While they eat, Chuck exhausts his guilt over dreaming such ridiculous, baseless dreams. He makes a point of pulling his sheet closer to Mike’s, once he’s worked up the guts, and saying, “Good night,” before he closes his eyes.  
  
And one night, Mike turns to him and says something that sounds almost like, “Night.”  
  
  
  
“Go!”  
  
Chuck sits right down in the snow. “No!”  
  
Ever since he was picked up by a man who was, according to every story he’d heard in the past seven years, meant to be a psychopathic murderer, Chuck hasn’t been sure of many things. He’d like to think he internalizes most of his screaming when the horse Mike insists on putting him on takes off at demonic speeds. He’s fairly certain the other horse like the way he braids its hair. He’s almost completely certain Mike wants to keep him alive for some unfathomable reason.  
  
And now, against every fiber of want in his body, he has to face the indubitable truth that Mike is trying to coerce him into raiding that tiny camp on the horizon. He even has the gall to look confused at Chuck’s refusal.  
  
“Go?”  
  
Chuck sets his jaw determinedly, half in refusal and half to keep his teeth from chattering as the cold begins to seep into his bones. “No, Mike. No go.”  
  
Mike frowns, then frowns deeper. The faint hope that his refusal would deter Mike’s morally challenged plans starts to fade away as Chuck sees him tighten his grip on the reins of his horse. Then Mike is turning and starting off towards the camp on his own, fast and without a single look back. The hope departs entirely as cold makes itself at home under Chuck’s skin.  
  
Next to him, he could swear the horse left behind rolls his eyes at him.  
  
“I thought he was going to be a good guy,” Chuck says to the horse, or perhaps in no one in particular. (He can’t figure out which option makes him more insane.) “I was so sure--.”  
  
He doesn’t have the time to finish lamenting, or to begin wondering why Mike would leave the meaner of his horses with Chuck if he were abandoning him, when that brown tuft of hair bounces back into view in the midst of the white tundra. He only has a second to think about how quick of a murderer Mike must be if he’s finished already (doesn’t even come close to the more optimistic thought of Mike perhaps changing his mind and plans) before he sees that Mike isn’t alone.  
  
The rider at his side has much of their face covered against the light snow and stares Chuck down with a look that’s rather remarkably similar to the one the horse next to him tends to send his way. Chuck shrinks back, the snow feeling impossibly colder through his clothes, as they bring a hand up to pull the shawl obscuring their face down and away.  
  
The woman is not what he expects. It isn’t that she’s a woman--the long hair whipping about behind her in the wind was indication enough of that. It’s that she’s pale, with the eyes of a boyarina, and definitely not a typical sight next to a grinning Tatar.  
  
Chuck looks down at himself. Then again--.  
  
“Aren’t you cold?” she asks in Russian.  
  
When Chuck doesn’t respond, opting instead to stare mutely, Mike says something excitedly to her in his language--which Chuck absently deduced to be Turkish some nights ago--before dismounting and reaching out to pull Chuck up by the arm.  
  
Chuck starts to yelp, but manages to compress it into a short whimper--though not quick enough to avoid a skeptical look from the woman.  
  
“Alright, let’s scrap that one. Mike has a different question for you.” She sways as though contemplating something, deciding a moment later on pulling her horse a few steps closer to stop at their side.  
  
Chuck swallows thickly, unable to keep his teeth from chattering now. “Y--es?”  
  
“What in the hell is your name?” She pauses. “And is the screaming really necessary?”  
  
  
  
She introduces herself as Julie when Mike finally stops beaming and saying, “Chuck,” while tapping a finger against Chuck’s chest. Chuck stops shaking--partly from cold and partly from sheer embarrassment of forgetting for several weeks to give Mike something as basic as his name--long enough to hear her and accept the offer to ride back to shelter with them.  
  
The camp Chuck mistook for defenseless is actually a trio of tents hosting a fearsome Mongol warrior who owes a debt of life to Mike. Julie says she never bothered learning his name, though she and the others all suspect is part of a phrase he cries out when charging into battle or mounting his horse--and typically before hearty meals as well. The others include herself, a near-tsarina deemed barren at the last minute and sent to a convent (“Which is just not cool. So I left.”) to live out the rest of her days, and a quiet man by the ambiguously foreign name of Dutch they met in Kiev (hailing from Egypt, and before that, a place none of them have heard of).  
  
“Then there’s Mike,” Julie says as they stop by a fire, Chuck’s skin grateful for the warmth through his damp clothes. “Our fearless leader.”  
  
Mike waves from the horses (of which there are twelve, between the four of them) as though understanding.  
  
“Who--was not trying to, you know, slay you all for fun?” Chuck asks carefully.  
  
From several steps left of them, hunched over some sort of game in the ground with the Mongol, Dutch says, “Nor you, tsarevich.”  
  
Julie blinks. Chuck laughs so loudly and nervously at the title he never expected to hear again that it makes one of the smaller horses reel.  
  
“Tsarevich?” Julie says.  
  
“Nope,” Chuck says. “No. Uh, no.”  
  
Julie believes him for a walloping total of zero seconds (because Dutch’s knowledge of Russian nobility is apparently extensive to the extreme) and spends no more than a minute forcing the truth out of him. By the time he’s finished telling his life story to an extent that convinces his audience (Dutch joined them after writing something on the ground to send the Mongol into a frothing rage) of its believability, Mike has taken a seat at their circle.  
  
“Could be useful near towns that don’t get the news much,” Julie says, nodding decisively. “A tsarevich.”  
  
Mike smiles at Chuck, which he’s been doing more in light of recent developments than ever before. “Tsarevich.”  
  
Chuck groans and puts his head in his hands.  
  
  
  
It isn’t long before he suddenly has friends again.  
  
Chuck quietly, and passionately, hates Dutch for an entire day. The man persists in calling him tsarevich even when he’s said time and again that he’d rather he not, and Chuck is convinced the hatred is mutual until Dutch cracks a smile from behind his academic exterior and asks him about the old Russian myths he knows. Dutch, always willing to ride slower than the others to listen to his stories, quickly becomes his favorite.  
  
Julie gives Dutch a run for his money in the grand, non-existent battle for Chuck’s favor. She takes an active interest in his history in the palace until she discovers he knows little of national politics outside the walls of the township he spent his childhood in, at which point she frowns and trots off to shoot birds with Mike (or whatever it is they do off at the head of their herd). She’s also the first, and probably only, to notice the way Mike’s horse rides harsher, as though with honest malicious intent, with Chuck on his back. He wants to kiss her feet for it.  
  
“That mutt’ll get jealous in a second if you leave him,” she says as she leads her spare, a chestnut Don that’s on the small side, to him. “Try her.”  
  
True to her word, it stops trying to kill him almost immediately after he takes a ride with a different horse and starts, in fact, to act like the sweet, mild-mannered mount Mike always seemed to think it was.  
  
But for the one lost nemesis, Chuck gains several. The Mongol insists on Chuck learning the game of crosses and circles that he plays with Dutch, but when Chuck wins against him by some fluke on his first try, he and all five of his improbably large horses start plotting bloody murder.  
  
Chuck avoids them as much as he can, and strives especially hard to keep his distance after a near-trampling incident that he’s sure was no accident. (He’s seen his fair share of assassination attempts. More than enough to recognize one for what it is, he’d think.)  
  
He endures a few more of these attempts, each one more comical and less dangerous than the one before. Dutch starts to write down and illustrate the myths he tells over long rides or cold dinners. Julie takes up her interest in him once more when he mentions Klara in a story of the palace. (Chuck asks her if she knew her, to which she says, “Not since I was Yulia.” They don’t talk about it again.)  
  
And Mike, Chuck sometimes thinks, watches them all with that endeared smile on his face.  
  
He learns about Mike in bits and pieces. Finally, now seated within a group Mike trusts to protect each other, Chuck is allowed to ride into towns with them to stock up on supplies. He watches them barter (something the Mongol is surprisingly good at whenever they find merchants sharing his language) with the surplus of game they hunt and feels indescribably silly for ever thinking Mike might be a serial thief. He helps them distribute clean water and basic rations, whatever they can afford to give, among survivors in raided villages of caravans they come across. They don’t avoid roads quite so often now, Mike only having done so to keep from running into trouble while travelling with Chuck as his only back-up.  
  
“Why was he alone?” Chuck asks on one of Julie’s more talkative days.  
  
He seems to have caught her at the tail-end of it, though, because all she says before riding ahead is, “Some days, he likes to be. He isn’t usually gone so long.”  
  
Chuck would have though Mike wasn’t the type to stare so much, either, but when he looks up in his direction as though to confirm Julie’s statement, staring and smiling seems to be all he’s been doing.  
  
It’d be almost creepy if it weren’t quite so--pleasant. Chuck thinks that might be the right word.  
  
Chuck thinks many thoughts as they ride--that Texas and Julie have a surprisingly functional relationship (and really, really loud intercourse) for two people who don’t speak the same language, that Dutch is singularly the smartest man in all the world, and that even the meanest horses in their herd are starting to warm up to him after the mutt’s change of heart.  
  
Mostly, he thinks about Mike.  
  
The more he hears of their stories, which only come to him in pieces, the more he hears of Mike saving their lives in a very literal sense. Chuck isn’t sure what, if anything, he thinks of being a part of a trend, but that Mike is the perpetual hero of their band of anti-bandits should really have been obvious weeks ago. Mike as leader, as protector, as good are all things that become increasingly obvious and unsurprising.  
  
He thinks Mike is great.  
  
He also thinks Mike is picking up pieces of Russian. He’ll huddle in close with Julie, and at times Dutch, for hours at a time, afterwards finding Chuck by whichever horse he’s tending for that day to say, “Hello,” or, “Thank you,” or most recently, “Are you okay?”  
  
And Chuck totally is. He’s left in charge with the honeyed apples and it doesn’t take long or much to bribe the horses for their affection. The bows he’s told to help maintain blister his hands until he’s told he’d been doing it very wrong and shown the right way. (He isn’t able to keep it under wraps for very long that he has no idea how to actually shoot a bow, much less aim at anything. In light of that, Julie tries to get him to carry a scimitar until he nearly takes his own hand off with it. Everyone agrees after that incident that an unarmed Chuck is best for the time being.)  
  
So he says, without reservation, “Mike, I totally am.”  
  
Mike’s brow furrows with confusion and he turns to run back to Julie for a translation. Chuck, uncharacteristically absent of embarrassment at his uncomprehended declaration, finds himself laughing.  
  
  
  
After they’re attacked by a peculiarly incompetent foursome of Tatar bandits, it’s unanimously decided (the Mongol grunts, which Julie insists is agreement) that Chuck has to learn how to wield some sort of weapon that isn’t the unusually high pitch his voice can reach in times of trouble.  
  
It’s also decided, by the departure of Julie and Dutch on some sort of scouting trip into a nearing town and the Mongol’s complete lack of patience, that Mike’s going to be the one to teach him.  
  
They don’t have much luck with a sword. Chuck refuses to think about the event in any great detail. Suffice to say that, at the end of it, Mike would not need to shave one side of his face that day.  
  
While Chuck is still apologizing, Mike takes his hands and drops his bow into them.  
  
“Oh, no,” Chuck says. He thrusts it back out to Mike. “No. Nope. Sorry, Mike, but no. That pony Dutch takes care of is still scared of me after the last time.”  
  
Mike pushes it back to Chuck and wordlessly sets a quiver down in his arms, too.  
  
“Mike.”  
  
Mike stops and smiles at the isolated call of his name, waiting for Chuck to continue. Instead of voicing all his doubts and worries about accidental horse-murder, Chuck sighs and nocks the arrow as best as he can after very deliberately turning away from Mike. In his periphery, he sees Mike cringe.  
  
“What? What did I do? Oh my God, it’s upside down. It’s upside down, isn’t it.”  
  
Mike reaches out before he can pull the string back and grips the limb of the bow to turn it upright in Chuck’s hands. Chuck groans and drops the arrow, positive he’s radiating enough embarrassment to melt the thin layer of snow under his feet.  
  
“It was upside down?”  
  
Mike stoops down and picks the arrow up. He nocks it into place and adjusts Chuck’s hands on the bow before stepping to the side. He draws back the string of an imaginary bow with his own arms, demonstrating the motion. Chuck remains motionless in his shame.  
  
Out of that very same shame, he’s also gone pliant enough to move his arms when Mike takes them and guides them back after noticing Chuck’s lack of imitation.  
  
“Wait,” Chuck says, the stretch of his arms registering all of a sudden. “Wait, wait, what am I shooting at? What am I--Mike. Mike, no.”  
  
Mike lets go of his arms and even though Chuck tells himself he isn’t going to loose an arrow with any living thing within range, his grip fails him and the string snaps back into place. The arrow disappears.  
  
Chuck is almost certain he hears the Mongol cursing at them over the sound of Mike’s encouraging cheer.  
  
They spend the rest of the afternoon practicing with the arrows after Mike switches him over to a crossbow. Chuck keeps firing into nothingness until the quiver is empty and his arms are sore. When they run to gather the arrows, several turn up hopelessly lost and half a dozen are clustered together.  
  
Mike points and smiles when they find those. Chuck doesn’t need him to know how to say it to feel his pride.  
  
After that break, Mike wants him to shoot a block of firewood he holds in front of himself and Chuck isn’t sure whether he should laugh or cry. He shakes his head and says, “No,” until Mike sets it down on top of a stack of their travelling packs.  
  
He spends the first half of the refilled quiver missing until Mike takes his arms again to move them a hair down and left. Chuck holds his breath when he releases the next bolt, fully expecting a hit.  
  
He misses, of course.  
  
But Mike repositions his arms again, and again, and by the time they start to lose daylight, there are four arrows embedded in the wood and one hanging on loosely by its tip. Julie and Dutch both give him their almost surprisingly genuine congratulations when they return to witness his progress.  
  
They celebrate over kvass and honeyed apples (that Mike insists on keeping on hand even though Chuck knows the others don’t care for them) while Texas makes unimpressed sounds at Chuck’s prized piece of firewood next to them.  
  
Before they turn in that night, with his legs numb under himself and Mike warm next to him, Chuck could almost swear he feels the press of a kiss to the top of his head.  
  
He doesn’t think twice of it because, quite frankly, he’s pretty sure he deserves it.  
  
  
  
The day Mike goes, he’s gone by the time Chuck wakes up. He isn’t normally gone so early in the morning, but he isn’t never. Chuck doesn’t start to think something is wrong until the others begin to leave.  
  
“Aren’t we waiting for Mike?”  
  
Julie frowns. “He didn’t tell you.”  
  
Chuck frowns right back, though it’s less of an annoyed expression and more of an increasingly distressed one. “Tell me what?”  
  
Mike, as it turns out, has gone on one of his spontaneous solo soul-searching trips. Chuck resists the urge to ask why in an indescribably petulant way--at least, he resists until they’re on the road, moving after a tip they’d gotten about a fleeing caravan that could use some clean water and a fighting hand.  
  
“Just--why?” he says as he trots his horse faster to match Julie’s pace. “Why did he go? Why does he ever go? Why did he go now?”  
  
“I don’t know. Sometimes he just--goes. Gets bored of this, maybe,” Julie says. She turns to him, deadpan. “Or maybe you did something to chase him off.”  
  
Chuck must look exactly as horrified as he feels because she laughs.  
  
“Don’t worry about it, Chuck. He’ll be back before you know it.”  
  
“But I already know it!”  
  
His very valid argument goes unheard (unfortunate, really, because of how valid it is) as the caravan they’re searching for appears in their line of sight. Chuck makes a mental note to repeat himself when they have a spare moment, but at the end of their forward sprint, he promptly forgets as an older memory boots it out.  
  
  
  
Jacob’s wagon looks and smells exactly like Chuck remembers (rickety and rancid), and Jacob is decidedly not in Denmark.  
  
“I heard you were in Denmark,” he can’t help saying. He slips into a slightly accented Slavonic, the language strange in his mouth after years of disuse.  
  
Jacob--older, but otherwise unchanged--looks up at him without any sign of recognition. It hits Chuck hard in the exact same spot Mike’s disappearance assaulted him earlier. He has every intention of working himself down into a deep wallow until the recognition he’d hoped for appears belatedly.  
  
“Chuck?”  
  
Chuck takes a graceless tumble off his horse and barely lands steadily enough to point a finger at himself. “Yes! That’s me!”  
  
From behind him, the Mongol yells something louder and scares the handful of traders behind Jacob into hiding. It takes the promise of feed for their malnourished horses and repairs for their damaged wagons to convince them Chuck and his travelling companions mean no harm, and the actualization of this promise to relax their nerves.  
  
And it takes several hours longer for Chuck and Jacob to catch up. After settling the surprisingly heated debate of how Chuck came to be separated from Jacob in the first place all those years ago (“You just wandered off,” Jacob said. Chuck gasped, “I did not!”) and the much less contested one of why Jacob never came for him (he heard of Chuck’s new occupation and thought a palace would be a better home than the road for a boy his age), they move into the awkward silence phase of the conversation.  
  
Julie interrupts at one point to eat with them and ask after recent news from Moscow, where she heard Jacob had spent time not long ago. Chuck welcomes the distraction and doesn’t rush for her departure one bit. (The tussle the Mongol gets into with two of the most well-liquored merchants requires her attention, though.) When she does finally go, Chuck draws in a breath and readies an apology for being history’s worst apprentice.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Jacob says before he can start. “Heck, boy. I thought you’d be happier there. Didn’t ever give any thought to something like this happening to you.”  
  
Chuck forgets whatever he’d rehearsed in his own head. “Huh? What happened to me?”  
  
“Oh, you know. Getting in bed with a foreigner like none I’ve ever seen, a hard-headed girl like that one, and a Mongol of all things.”  
  
Chuck sputters and, perhaps too high-pitched to even be heard, says, “I was never in bed with any of them! And you haven’t even met Mike yet!”  
  
There’s a pause more intensely awkward than the one before. Jacob frowns. “You know what I--for Christ’s sake, Chuck, what’re you getting defensive for? I was trying to apologize for a bad call here.”  
  
“It wasn’t a bad call,” Chuck says immediately, and defensively. He slows down to think that through a second after the words leave his mouth while Jacob keeps looking puzzled. He considers backtracking and just accepting the apology, because he was nearly assassinated several times, barely avoided enlistment in the pseudo-national pseudo-army, and narrowly lucked out of death by Mongol raid. He did fear for his young life for two years after the only adult figure he could remember in his life disappeared, leaving him in a foreign palace to be groomed as a prince.  
  
But with Mike and his friends, he did master a deceptively simple and frustratingly addictive game he probably would never have come to learn. He does own his very own horse now (courtesy of Julie as soon as she was sure he could probably care for one without scaring it or himself half to death each time they interacted). He now knew how to work a crossbow and, on occasion, even hit something he means to hit.  
  
He knew Mike, too, which he’s pretty sure is worth the most out of all of that.  
  
“It wasn’t a bad call,” Chuck says again. “I dunno if I’m happier than I would’ve been growing up on the road and what you do now, but I’m where I want to be now. I’m really okay.”  
  
The puzzlement has started fading to something more relaxed in Jacob’s jaw. “You’re happy?”  
  
Chuck nods, the answer decided weeks ago when Mike asked, “Are you okay?” and Chuck answered, whether he said it out loud or not, “I’m happy.”  
  
“I’m happy,” is what he says now, the statement as true now as when it remained unspoken before.  
  
Jacob seems to believe it and it seems to be enough. He smiles and slaps a hand to Chuck’s back. “Good man. Now where’s this Mike character I’ve yet to meet?”  
  
Chuck’s shoulders slump the slightest bit. “Oh. Right.”  
  
  
  
They ride with the caravan for three days until they reach a town sizable enough to be named on a map with more than a dozen copies in existence. Chuck is reluctant to leave Jacob until the man threatens bodily harm if he loiters around any longer.  
  
“You spend hours every day talking to me about this group of yours,” Jacob said. “Obviously your place is with them. Besides, you wouldn’t disappear on your good friend Mike without a word of goodbye, would you?”  
  
(For a second, Chuck bitterly resented mentioning Mike and Mike’s inexplicable devotion to keeping him alive. Of course Jacob would assume, perhaps correctly, the best of Mike and mention said good at a key moment to win an argument. The resentment passed, and Chuck relented.)  
  
After a parting hug that felt almost forebodingly permanent, Chuck turns and exits the room Jacob secured in town for his stay. He walks right into sunlight and a tighter, warmer hug.  
  
And this time, he definitely feels the press of a kiss to his forehead.  
  
Instead of addressing that, Chuck struggles free and frowns at Mike. “You! You left!”  
  
Mike smiles, either completely missing his meaning or completely unashamed. “Book.”  
  
Chuck blinks. “Huh?”  
  
He’s taken by the arm, then, and led over to the horse that Mike had left with. A new pack has appeared alongside the few Mike took with him, and it’s to that which Mike points when he says again, “Books.”  
  
Chuck, though uncertain of his conclusion, begins to think he’s being told he was abruptly dumped for a week for a book. Possibly multiple books.  
  
Not that the latter made anything about this explanation any better.  
  
  
  
While Mike makes several stacks of the books he wants Chuck to look at after they leave town, Julie explains that he had been out looking for a library Dutch told him might have a series of basic texts that would help in learning the Russian language. Chuck isn’t sure why this very simple explanation wasn’t offered to him at any point in the past several days, but he doesn’t have the chance to ask for clarification on the delay as Mike keeps on exuding this overwhelming sort of excitement.  
  
Chuck doesn’t even have time to be cross with all these supposed friends of his because all Mike wants to do is show him those books and talk to him.  
  
Not that this is something Chuck intends to complain about.  
  
Mike takes to asking, “Tired?” after they finish a day’s practice with the crossbow and saying, “Come eat,” or, “Come sleep,” instead of the typical gestures he previously used to direct Chuck when necessary.  
  
They fall into a routine that includes Mike without trouble, though the rhythm of the routine doesn’t ever feel quite right.  
  
There’s a sense of change Chuck feels, but can’t name. He doesn’t worry (beyond the day of fretting, pointlessly he’ll later decide, about Mike’s potential eventual disappearances) much about it, the feeling too slight to be truly bothersome with Mike and his preposterous accent acting as a constant distraction.  
  
It doesn’t become so pronounced a change that Chuck can’t ignore it until Mike says, “Come back, tsarina.”  
  
They’re far enough from camp, chasing down an arrow that went rogue, that Chuck is fairly certain it goes unheard by all but his intended audience (and perhaps some curious wildlife) when he shrills, “Come where what?”  
  
Mike holds up the arrow they’d been searching for, proud and unassuming. “Come back.”  
  
Chuck would normally listen to reason and the nomadic instincts developing in him from these recent travels, the ones telling him to follow Mike back to shelter before the sun properly sets. He almost starts to move, in fact, before he catches himself.  
  
“Wait,” he says, and thinks.  
  
He thinks Mike might think he’s a princess--not in the literal girl sense, but in every other fairy tale sense of the word. This--along with Mike’s hero complex and tendency to save him from perilous (and sometimes not at all perilous) situations--should perhaps be annoying, but Chuck hasn’t ever thought of it that way. It’s obvious enough by now that Mike only means well, and Chuck doesn’t start doubting that.  
  
He does move on to thinking that Mike might think of him as weak, but that thought passes as quickly as the first when he reminds himself there isn’t a malicious bone in all of Mike’s body.  
  
Several more thoughts pass over several more minutes, but Chuck can’t ultimately fathom why Mike might call him tsarina so earnestly. He can’t put a reason to Mike’s insistence on learning a language they can share, to Mike’s patience with his amateur archery skills, to Mike’s saving his life and taking him on as a friend--all things he’d never given much thought to, never tried putting reason to.  
  
With Mike smiling at him and waiting for him, Chuck thinks he probably should give some thought to these things and Mike’s reasons. He’s learned not to doubt him--as much as any Russian-raised boy can trust someone he meets as a Tatar horseman--but he doesn’t know him any more than he did when he woke from his first near-drowning.  
  
He thinks harder and longer about motives and intentions and doesn’t realize he’s thinking out loud until Mike clears his throat and takes him by the arm, more carefully than he usually does, to pull him back towards camp. Chuck stands firm for no more than a second before going with, because maybe it’s as Mike liking him a fair amount and taking a genuine, natural interest in befriending the heck out of him.  
  
The feeling would be only mutual, after all, and if this looming feeling of change was intent on embodying itself in the form of that realization, Chuck could live with that.  
  
  
  
Apparently taking his acceptance as permission to run free, the changes only increase in number and magnitude. As soon as they fall back into a routine that doesn’t feel off in any obscure ways, Dutch surprises them all with his resignation from their (mostly) merry band of heroes.  
  
“Are you going to vanish into myth as the greatest mind of our generation after a few years of work shrouded in secrecy and politics?” Chuck whispers to him after he’s announced his plans.  
  
Dutch gives him and his rampant imagination a look and says, “I’m going home to my wife.”  
  
“Oh,” Chuck says to the much more sensible explanation.  
  
Not a week later, Julie decides they’ve had enough time to recover and says, “The Grand Prince is dying. I’m going to Moscow.”  
  
Chuck feels rather justified in saying, “What?”  
  
She explains, at great length, what changes she hopes to accomplish during the time of political unrest that will surely follow Grand Prince Ivan’s upcoming, inevitable death. For all her effort, Chuck doesn’t understand a word of what she says.  
  
But all Mike says is, “Be safe,” as he sends her away under the protection of her own skill and the Mongol’s rather zealous affections.  
  
Chuck says again, as the last of his newest friends ride away, “What?”  
  
Mike doesn’t have any explanations for him, but he makes everything about the loss strangely simple. They spend much of the day travelling except for the few hours Mike takes to hunt or visit towns for supplies, both chores he keeps Chuck with him for now. They camp where they can, avoiding the last surviving remnants of the Great Horde as best as they can. Chuck catches himself thinking of it as the good old days once in a while.  
  
And once in a while, when they fall asleep over lilted conversations in basic Russian, Chuck wakes up to Mike’s arm around him in what’s too angular to be a comfortable embrace, but an effective reminder of Mike’s consistency nonetheless.  
  
  
  
Chuck still misses the stench of Jacob’s cart at times, and on occasion he thinks about Klara. He misses Julie and Dutch--and even the Mongol whose name he had once come close to pronouncing--on a near-daily basis, but all in all, he’s pretty proud of how well he’s adapted to all these years of change.  
  
When their latest stop in a welcoming town announces itself as the last pocket of civilization before the Russian border, Chuck must admit to a renewed bout of panic. Europe is a distant memory he barely retained, and he’s entirely too unsure what Mike’s relationship with the continent might be.  
  
“Come,” Mike says as they ready the horses after a day’s rest.  
  
Chuck looks up and sees him ready to continue West, towards cities and possibilities he’s only ever heard of in children’s stories. He wonders where Mike is leading him, if he even has a course in mind, and looks the other way--a potentially endless tundra, but a familiar one.  
  
The growing light of the sun makes him squint until his eyes are closed to what once was familiar and, blindly, he turns back towards Mike.  
  
“Where will we go?” Chuck asks, not needing to know.  
  
Mike, whether he fully understands or not, gives the right answer: “Come with me.”


End file.
